Xion Community

Xion 1.0 build 118 Beta Release

Xion 1.0 build 118 Beta Release

Posted: July 5th, 2009, 1:28 pm

by Cliff Cawley

WARNING:This is a Beta Build. That means it has fixes and features that are NEW. It is also possible it has bugs that are NEW! If you are looking for stability, please don't expect this build to be perfectly stable. It may have issues. If on the other hand you are happy to try this build out and post any bugs back in this thread, then please do!

Modified the Default Visualisation to immediately use the base color if its available, otherwise it will fade (i.e. between random colors)

Fixed a crash in the Default Visualisation when you switched to the oscilliscope, then Disabled and Enabled the plugin

Fixed the playlist resize when skins were made with blank space around them - Thanks Lance!

Fixed when loading a skin at its minimum size that it would sometimes display the corner pieces and not properly tile in between

Fixed the resize rectangle from sometimes detecting two mouseups and causing some overdraw

Added the keyword snapvalue to the frame slider so that you can choose between snapping the values, or smoothly selecting the values. Smooth slider allows you to drag around and only snaps when you release

Added extra clock keywords so that you can control the appearance of the clock. Keywords are nominsec, nosec, nomarker and force24. These are for the system clock display only.

Added support for startframe keyword. Add this to a frame in order to mark it as the start frame for an animation

Moved Xion Skins, Playlists and Stations to the My Documents folder. Left existing settings back in Application Data. Allows for much easier user managing of these files

Fixed the trans slider setting the transparency to 0 and causing the layer to be marked as hidden. Now uses a very small trans value of 0.001 instead, causing the layer to be invisible, but not hidden - Thanks xonenine!

Fixed a bug with the resize rectangle drawing of the playlist causing it to sometimes draw at a different location than where the mouse was

Renamed the Font Strikethrough from fs to fst

Added Quick Search text to the search box when it is blank

Added 'ignore' keyword. Any layer containing this keyword won't be loaded by Xion and will be completely ignored

Added a new indicator layer called 'indi_repeattrack' or 'indi_repeattrk' to represent the track repeat mode

Added a right click menu to the repeat button for changing repeat modes

Added support for 'flipy' to all Text layers

Fixed rendering issues caused by layers overlapping a snaprectangle, when a snaprectangle was smaller than the overlapping layers - Thanks Rutabaga!

Modified Repeat Track mode to allow you to use Next/Prev to select new songs. The track is only repeated if you let it get to the end of the track

Added Reset Window Position and Size to the Playlist window options

If you find bugs specifically related to this build, please post them here instead of the Bug reporting forum. Any feedback positive or negative should also go in here, no new threads. This way all feedback, etc related to this build will be in the one place.

ABOUT THIS BUILD:

I've made a rather large change in this release. Since the last public release I moved the Skins, Playlists, etc to the Application data, however during tests of the beta builds, its become apparent that only some settings should be here.

So for this build I've moved all Skins, Playlists and Stations to the My Documents folder under the Xion folder. All other settings are now left under Application Data.

This correctly adheres to the Windows Vista and Windows 7 requirements for non-admins.

There are also a couple of extra new features, in preparation for the new Xion default skin (which is getting really close to being finished, Lance is doing an awesome job!)

Crash reporter is again disabled. If there are crashes I'll make a new temporary build in order to reproduce. If not, we're all good.

Let me know if you find any issues! Also if everything is running smoothly then please let me know too!

Any questions or bugs related to this build should be posted here only!

Enjoy!

Cliff

Posted: July 5th, 2009, 5:32 pm

by Deathy

I hate that the program create a new folder in My Documents -_-'

And about this release, why do you call Xion 1.0 and not Xion 2 for example?

Posted: July 5th, 2009, 6:56 pm

by Cliff Cawley

Deathy Wrote:I hate that the program create a new folder in My Documents -_-'

Well that's the Microsoft documented location for it. In Windows 7 its just called Documents and they're making it more for customizable documents.

Otherwise I have to put all skins in a hidden folder, which some people can't get to.

Just look at all the games these days that put their stuff in My Documents, there's a reason for it.

Deathy Wrote:And about this release, why do you call Xion 1.0 and not Xion 2 for example?

Because there haven't been any massive changes to the structure. Plus if I make it 2.0 its going to divide the online skin archives. All of a sudden all of the hundreds of skins will no longer exist, and the count will be back to 0 skins for Xion 2.0

Anyway, its confusing for users to remember all these version numbers. Hence I like to refer to Xion as build numbers

Cliff

Posted: July 5th, 2009, 10:52 pm

by djinn2

Great work Cliff

The new repeat track functions perfectly and I've not encountered any bugs so far. I nearly wept with joy when I saw the fixes to the playlist scrollbar

Posted: July 5th, 2009, 11:51 pm

by SLoB

Hmm something has happened to animation groups handling over the past few betas, even with the fixed version of Amorbous the colour sections are running out of sync when they have passed the 1st iteration of colours available.

Also it's now possible to drag the top text layer in the songticker where the underneath songticker layer acts as a shadow layer, the shadow layer does not move with it, end result is the 2 songtickers are out of alignment.

The only workaround I can see and this has been a long time feature request is to allow shadow and other text effects via code so we can add in layer keywords such as shadow (r,g,b,x,y,t,b) kinda thing

Bug in changing tags for an m4a track if the track is playing - Unable to write

Posted: July 6th, 2009, 1:41 am

by Jikaru

I think to fix SLoBs deal with the text not scrolling together is make 'link(x)' work with 'flipy'

Xion would determine the links via 'flipy' directly and use link as a means to scroll similarly named layers (i.e title layers would be linked, and track layers would be linked) at the same time like they were one.

But that would require 'flipy' to be a special command.

Or you could add SLoB's slightly longer method.

Posted: July 6th, 2009, 2:24 am

by SLoB

I'm not using a flip on this, however, if you look at most of my skins for example I use a shadow songticker layer to give a nice dropped shadow effect but yea reflections etc would be nice.
Would link even work with it tho, not tested. The songticker text drag would seem to me to be Xion functionality and not link properly to another layer of the same.

it really needs the songticker to support effects which would then enable lots more control and avoid the early hacks we all found we could do.

What would be really cool is to have lots of options such as skew, perspective, curved, vertical, shadows (inc blur), reflection, glow, fade in/out to name but a few. All of these are perfectly doable.

Posted: July 6th, 2009, 9:04 am

by Cliff Cawley

SLoB Wrote:I'm not using a flip on this, however, if you look at most of my skins for example I use a shadow songticker layer to give a nice dropped shadow effect but yea reflections etc would be nice.Would link even work with it tho, not tested. The songticker text drag would seem to me to be Xion functionality and not link properly to another layer of the same.

Have you tried using link(x) with this? Looks like I forgot to document it, but if you use link(x) with the track layers, when you scroll one, it will scroll the other the same amount

Try adding it and let me know how it goes.

Cliff

Posted: July 6th, 2009, 9:59 am

by SLoB

I will do, however, we shouldn't have to change anything Compatibility should remain key with all previous skins.

Looks like I'm going to have to update the skin cos the out of sync part for the colours is annoying me no end, those are supposed to remain constantly in sync and were fine a few betas ago.
Not sure where along the line it's changed within the betas but something has deffo changed in the way the groups/savestate/paused is concerned.
should be able to use the link kw now though so it should remain sync issue free

Posted: July 6th, 2009, 1:43 pm

by Cliff Cawley

Well I can stop adding new features so that all existing skins work 100%, if you like?

The 'functionality' you are talking about was a bug on my part. It should have never worked like that. Essentially it meant that ALL track layers no matter what size they were, would scroll. Originally this wasn't an issue because you couldn't drag them, but due to the dragging that you requested, it exposed the bug and I fixed it.

If I remove the ability to drag/scroll track text then this 'issue' can be marked as 'fixed'. I don't think you want me to be putting bugs back in, do you?

In which case I have to break things here and there in order to make them better for the future.

As for the colours being out of sync, I'll have to investigate, that might be a bug that's crept in with all the other changes.

Cliff

Posted: July 6th, 2009, 2:30 pm

by Jikaru

Thanks for clarifying Cliff, I didn't know Link(x) scrolled text together, using flipy now should yield a very attractive reflective text

And shadow is very doable too...BUT by using link(x) does that mean the text will be aligned properly as well? or can they get ahead/behind of each other?

Posted: July 6th, 2009, 3:31 pm

by Cliff Cawley

Jikaru Wrote:Thanks for clarifying Cliff, I didn't know Link(x) scrolled text together, using flipy now should yield a very attractive reflective text

And shadow is very doable too...BUT by using link(x) does that mean the text will be aligned properly as well? or can they get ahead/behind of each other?

It should be, yes. As long as you set the layers up the same and linked them with link(x) they'll follow each other exactly.

Cliff

Posted: July 7th, 2009, 3:53 am

by Sinusoid

This is starting to really take shape! I've begun to use it even more often than foobar. I couldn't figure out how to toggle between each indicator for 'repeat playlist', 'repeat track', and 'repeat off' exclusively (i.e. one of the indicators ends up remaining drawn behind a new indicator state) but for now I'm just using buttons with opaque backgrounds so that it hides the last state. I'm fairly sure this isn't a bug, however, and more to do with some confusion about creating layers with the 'not' operator.

Posted: July 7th, 2009, 4:50 am

by SLoB

Ahh cool Cliff

I've no probs with things that break, sometimes you have to crack a few eggs, it should be marked as such in the reference chart and the fixed log so skinners know some things may have been fixed and may break existing skin functionality

Posted: July 7th, 2009, 5:08 am

by logokas

Xion failed to create folders for itself in the My Documents folder, and produced error boxes for said failure.

Streamline install on XP SP3 ( Streamline install being, the installer was ran while the player was working ).